Sequence (Second Edition)

Arun Lakra

• Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780369100740
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Drama
• Index: Literature

"Luck is like irony. Not everybody who thinks they got it, got it."

Theo has been named Time Magazine 's Luckiest Man Alive. For twenty consecutive years he has successfully bet double or nothing on the Super Bowl coin toss. And he's getting ready to risk millions on the twenty-first when he is confronted by Cynthia, a young woman who claims to have figured out his mathematical secret.

Stem-cell researcher and professor Dr. Guzman is on the verge of a groundbreaking discovery. She's also learned that one of her students has defied probability to get all 150 multiple-choice questions wrong on his genetics exam, but it's not until he shows up to her office in the middle of the night that she's able to determine if it's simply bad luck.

The two narratives intertwine like a double helix of DNA to examine the interplay between logic and metaphysics, science and faith, luck and probability. Belief systems clash, ideas mutate, and order springs from chaos. With razor-sharp wit and playful language, Sequence asks, in our lives, in our universe, and even in our stories, does order matter?

Sequence

Lights up.

Dr. Guzman and Theo enter. Theo carries an unopened umbrella.

They converge at the whiteboard. It shows a mess of diagrams, numbers, and words.

Dr. Guzman turns to face the board. She finds an eraser, wipes the board clean.

Theo turns to face the audience. With mock trepidation, he pops open the umbrella.

Playfully, he peers out from under it, looks upward. He closes the umbrella.

Theo moves to the ladder. He circles it. Mysteriously. Mischievously.

Dr. Guzman takes a moment to find a marker. She accidentally drops it, picks it up again.

Abruptly, Theo ducks under the ladder. He emerges, welcomes the applause.

Chest pain! Is he having a heart attack? No, he’s just joking around.

Dr. Guzman writes on the board: Which came first?

Theo strides to a wall mirror.

Dr. Guzman addresses the audience.

Theo fixes his hair in the mirror.

Dr. Guzman: The question is, which came first?

Theo suddenly takes a big swing with his umbrella handle, smashing the mirror.

The chicken or the egg?

Theo: Macbeth!

Theo looks up to the heavens, opens his arms, waits for the lightning bolt that never comes.

Dr. Guzman: I submit to you, despite popular misconception, that the question is not rhetorical.

Theo addresses the audience.

Theo: Luck is like irony. Not everybody who thinks they got it, got it.

Dr. Guzman: One had to come first. Wouldn’t you agree? Unless you postulate simultaneous creation. That is, unless you postulate God.

Dr. Guzman writes on the board: God.

Theo: Luck is like breasts. It’s relative. If everybody had big breasts, we’d just call them breasts. And we wouldn’t stare. As much.

He picks up a marker. He writes on the board: Luck.

Dr. Guzman: But we’re scientists, are we not? At least until your final results are posted. And we know Borel’s law states if the odds of an event are less than one in ten to the fiftieth, that event will never happen in the entire time and space of our known universe.

Theo: You are not all lucky; I’m sorry to have to break it to you. In fact, I suspect the truly lucky ones are those whose wives did not drag them to a book reading three hours before kickoff on Super Bowl Sunday.

Dr. Guzman: So the chances of the chicken and the egg evolving simultaneously are perilously close to zero. Ergo, it must have been sequential.

Theo: Take a guy in a wheelchair who can’t even take a crap by himself. Ask him if he considers himself lucky. Trust me. He’ll say yes. Every time. He has persuaded himself he’s the luckiest guy in the world. But he’s not. You know why?

Pause.

Because I am.

Dr. Guzman: Everything happens sequentially. Music. DNA. Every story ever told. There is an order to the universe. If chicken, then egg. Or if egg, then chicken. And, even more importantly, the order implies causality. Egg creates chicken. Or chicken spawns egg.

Theo: What determines success? Does a Nobel Prize recipient stand up and say, “I’m an average schmuck who just got lucky”? No, they won’t tell you that. But I will. Because in many ways I’m just like you. I put on my pants one leg at a time — always the right one first, as someone once pointed out to me.

Dr. Guzman: But whatever you do, do not tell me it doesn’t matter. That’s a cheat. The only thing I detest more than cheating is laziness, and chaos is lazy. Entropy is lazy. God is lazy.

Dr. Guzman circles the word God.

Theo: Except, on the luck scale, I am off the charts. If you look at the odds I’ve fortuitously overcome . . . I’m told I’m a one in a billion. That’s with a B!

Dr. Guzman: Order is sweat. Order is who you are and why you’re here today. In this classroom. On this planet. Wasting...